1) Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the present invention relate to shopping and, more particularly, to systems and methods for organizing and applying rules, fares, and scheduling to process travel-related shopping requests.
2) Description of Related Art
Reservation systems and Internet fare search engines use specialized techniques to review fare offerings, both published and unpublished (i.e., specially offered fares not normally available), across a number of different vendors (e.g., airlines, car rental companies, hotels, and the like) and return these results to the buyer in some ranked ordering based on the attributes the customer has requested, such as by price. Each travel vendor's system allows the fare search engines to determine which of their fares are available for the dates and itinerary being considered, and the fare search engines sort and select the best alternatives. The objective of traditional fare search processing is to find the best fare offers available in the marketplace.
However, processing air shopping requests is a difficult problem to solve efficiently and requires simultaneous scrutiny of many factors that span flight schedules, availability, published fares, rule restrictions, complex business logic, and carrier exceptions. The order in which the variables are analyzed has evolved with varying degrees of success while continuously emphasizing the need for more efficient techniques for processing requests. The looming competitive pressures that encompass temporal functionality, such as calendar shopping, continue to expand the search space, require additional resources, and decrease efficiency of air shopping.
One of the primary partitions of the business data is the vast array of fares and rules that describe the price of service across pieces of a huge market network with well described restrictions. Traditional thinking emphasizes a sequence of origination-destination objects formed from either schedules or fares. An inherent challenge to the shopping problem space is managing volumes of data objects that must be directly accessed, cross-referenced, or traversed to process a specific transaction. These tasks are not trivial and demand considerable effort in real-time, caching, and database persistence that ultimately ebb overall performance.
It would therefore be advantageous to provide techniques for organizing and applying rules, fares, and scheduling to more efficiently process air shopping requests. In addition, it would be advantageous to provide techniques for reducing the search space and eliminating duplicate effort to produce desirable itineraries.